Bedside Reading

Contributors to the Winter Fiction Issue recommend books that they particularly enjoyed in 2006.

Contributors to the Winter Fiction Issue recommend books that they particularly enjoyed in 2006.

Julian Barnes

The two best books I read in 2006 were “Suite Française,” by Irène Némirovsky, and “Fouché,” by Stefan Zweig. “Suite Française” is not just a searing act of reportage and verisimilitude (the period being the fall of France in 1940 and the immediate aftermath); it also offers a penetrating analysis of the moral failure of the French at that time. Though Némirovsky completed only two of her planned five volumes, what she has left us stands free and wonderful by itself.

Stefan Zweig is one of those writers, famous throughout the world in his time, whose reputation has dimmed greatly in the decades since his death. His long-out-of-print biography of Joseph Fouché, the chief of the French state police, who came to power during the French Revolution and flourished under several subsequent administrations, is a masterly study of the ultimate political survivor, one who knew everyone’s secrets, had a finger in every pie, and believed in virtually nothing. Fouché makes some of those around at the moment look positively riddled with principles.

Louise Erdrich

“The Hard Life,” by Flann O’Brien, is one of my very favorite short comic novels. The Aubrey/Maturin novels, by Patrick O’Brian, are so addictive that after I finish one I have to hide the next from myself for a little while in order to do anything else but read. I also suggest “Bangkok 8” by John Burdett, if after too much of the usual holiday cheer you need a thriller about jade, the sex trade, deadly snakes, and interesting forms of corruption in this life and the next. I like to read Barbara Pym in January, and look forward to my little pile of her books. Finally, “Strange Empire,” by Joseph Kinsey Howard, is the classic history of the grand and doomed attempt to form a Métis nation in North America—it’s full of marvellous detail and devastating portraits of Louis Riel, Poundmaker, Wandering Spirit, Gabriel Dumont, the action at Batoche, in Saskatchewan, and the saga of the Gatling gun.

I am in Yunnan Province, in southern China, having just crossed over by land from Vietnam. I have been travelling off and on since last January, in my own footsteps (from my 1975 travel book, “The Great Railway Bazaar”). On this trip, I’ve read some wonderful books, among them “Dirty Snow,” by Georges Simenon; “Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare,” by Philip Short; “Alexander the Great,” by Robin Lane Fox; and “The Sorrow of War,” by Bao Ninh. ♦

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